Film / News
Nick Park gets prehistoric
Following their successful partnership on the Shaun the Sheep movie, Bristol’s Aardman Animations is teaming up once again with French distributor StudioCanal for Nick Park’s first film as director since 2005’s Wallace and Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. In an announcement made at the Cannes film festival, it has been revealed that the new stop-frame animation will be called Early Man. The brief official synopsis goes like this:
Set at the dawn of time, when dinosaurs and woolly mammoths roamed the earth, Early Man will tell the story of how a plucky caveman unites his tribe against a mighty enemy and saves the day.
In a statement, Nick Park added: “I’m very excited to be making this film with such great partners – StudioCanal and BFI. And with the support of the incredible team at Aardman – bringing this inept bunch of cavemen to life is going to be a hilarious adventure!”
is needed now More than ever
In the past, Aardman’s experience with major Hollywood studios DreamWorks and Sony has not been a particularly happy one. But StudioCanal seems to be a perfect fit. Previously best known for distributing art movies, it has recently broadened its output and made its first foray into family films with Paddington, which turned out to be the biggest hit in the company’s history. The Shaun the Sheep movie proved to be a sizeable hit in the UK too, taking nearly £13m, and has been showing in local multiplexes continuously since February. It is also playing strongly around the globe and will finally get a release in the US on August 7. Aardman have made no secret of their desire to produce a sequel, but no formal announcement has yet been made.
Early Man will be co-written by long-time Aardman collaborators Mark Burton and John O’Farrell, whose partnership goes all the way back to Spitting Image. Their association with Aardman began when they supplied additional dialogue for Chicken Run in 1999. Burton also co-wrote the screenplay for The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which won the Best Animated Feature Oscar in 2006, and co-wrote and co-directed the Shaun the Sheep movie with Richard Starzak.
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